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He might be a comedy icon, but even the legendary Bill Murray has collaborations he wished he'd gone through with. While appearing on The Howard Stern Show, the star of gems such as Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day revealed that Clint Eastwood was a filmmaker he never got to pair up with and still regrets not doing so.
The team-up almost happened way back when. Murray explained that following his side-splitting stint in the military with Stripes, he set Eastwood in his sights next. “I was like, I got to call this guy. So I called him out of the blue, and he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy?’ Because I just made Stripes and he had this great idea for an enormous Navy thing,” Murray recalled. Unfortunately, it was the pitch that Eastwood made that put the SNL legend off the idea.
“And when he said, ‘Would you ever want to do another service comedy,’ like jeez, ‘Would I become like Abbott and Costello?’ I had to do like military movies? And I said, ‘Well, God, I guess maybe I shouldn’t.’” It was a choice Murray confesses he looked back on with a very different point of view. “It’s one of the few regrets I have is that I didn’t do it. Because it was a big-scale thing, and I would have gotten a great – I don’t know if I’d have gotten a great death scene, it was more of a comedy, that one – but it was great,” he explained. “He had access to World War II boats and he could have like made a flotilla and stuff, and there was some cool stuff in it.”
According to Murray, even now, “When I see him, I’m like: ‘I’m sorry, I wish I’d done that Clint, I’m really sorry.’ He’s certainly well over it. He’s a very resilient fella.” All that can be done now is to mark this one up as a movie that could've been. For now, check out Bill Murray's best movies here, none of which contain Clint Eastwood
